Who in the shadow and who in light …

The summer school, called Clash of Elements, focused on an in-depth exploration of various types of energies and elements. The educational program of the school, along with the methodology employed in the learning film, was conceptualized by the mentors of the Chto Delat collective. The school hosted seminars delving into topics such as green energy, fusion, the demise of the petromodern era, ecological crises, geophilosophy, and the nexus between fossil-based economies and wars.

The installation, first realized at the exhibition Petromelancholia at Brutus, Rotterdam in 2023 comprises the main collective film and two supplementary videos: a lecture-performance by Oksana Timofeeva and a series of mini-performances by the school's mentors titled Inside the Diagram. This film was produced as a visual experiment in working with various speculative graphs and charts describing different data related to climate change, the workings of energy processing and production mechanisms, the war in Ukraine, and statistics of natural disasters.

“We all live in a world of numbers, quantitative comparisons, timelines linking different times and events. Their festive visibility, the accessibility of the narrative is striving to achieve the effect of enlightenment and "illumination" (illuminatio - lat.) - we, kind of, continue to believe in the already materialized metaphysics of light and the cognitive power of reason. It is this quality of materials that provoked our performative method of work - changing the positions of bodies inside the projections of various graphs. Sometimes they turn out to be an absurd set of pictures that conditionally (and sometimes literally) correspond to the infographics of a large narrative. These interventions remind us of the strange, possible distortions of the "divine (dis)order" and provide an opportunity to look at the world of numbers and big data from an unexpected perspective."

The narrative of the film 15 portraits of people affected by different elements takes shape as a sequence of portraits depicted within the ruins of the historic Villa Salomon in Hamburg. This structure encompasses diverse industrial spaces that are temporarily utilized by the artists. Each portrait emerges from auto-fictional encounters with distinct elements. Together, they coalesce into a collective portrait of individuals navigating in a period of growing instability and insecurity. These portraits are composed as a juxtaposition of the live presence of the participant and their shadow on the screen. This deliberate cinematic technique underscores the boundaries and fragility of human existence.

Interwoven amidst the portraits and collective dance scenes, viewers can see glimpses of the participants dismantling the white screen previously employed for shadow projection. This deconstruction is accompanied by a voiceover enumerating catastrophic events, reflecting their interchangeable portrayal in the media landscape, as well as the trauma associated with passive consumption and observation. The learning film culminates in a scene of final collective deconstruction, accompanied by a vocalized commentary.